1000 Heart Procedures Completed by World-class Unit

A
cardiac services team is celebrating completing its
one-thousandth procedure meaning care closer to home for Bay
patients.

The Bay Of Plenty District Health
Board’s (BOPDHB) Cardiac Services Team, based at Tauranga
Hospital, has just performed its one-thousandth Percutaneous
Coronary Intervention (PCI). The milestone represented high
quality care on their doorstep for Bay residents said
cardiologist Dr Jonathan Tisch.

“Before April
2012, patients requiring a stent would have had to travel to
Waikato Hospital for a procedure; with all that potentially
entailed, travel, accommodation, etc,” said Dr Tisch.
“That is no longer the case and we average around 240 PCIs
from our unit at Tauranga Hospital each year.

“PCIs are where we open a heart artery via a tube
through the skin rather than undertaking open heart surgery.
It’s minimally invasive which means the majority of these
patients only require an overnight stay afterwards.

“We go in through the wrist and a thin tube is
threaded up through a blood vessel into the heart. We inject
dye and take X-ray pictures to see where the narrowing of
the artery is and then, if it’s suitable, open that up
with a little wire scaffold over a balloon. That opens the
artery up and allows the blood through again.”

The
unit began with one stent cardiologist, Dr Barry Kneale, who
was joined by Dr KL Chow in July 2016. The cardiologists are
supported by an expert nursing team, radiographers and
technologists.

Dr Tisch said the unit’s results
were audited and the excellent success rates, and extremely
low complication rates, bore comparison with any cardiology
unit in the world. It completed its one-thousandth PCI on
Thursday 26 February.

“1000 procedures have been
performed successfully, locally, nearer to people’s homes,
which is great news for the community we serve,” said Dr
Tisch.

The news comes on the back of the BOPDHB’s
new Cardiac Catheterisation Laboratory (Cath Lab) taking its
first patient on the afternoon of Monday 16 January. The
Cath Lab forms part of the Cardiac Services Building 50
development at the hospital which also includes a new
clinical physiology
area.

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